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Acquia Coverage

Drupal is not known as the most performant application, neither is the PHP language it is written on, but there are lots of things you can do to increase the performance of your Drupal site. This article will touch on many of those methods covering key modules, configuring these modules and setting up other applications to aid your Drupal site.

CIOs looking to replace legacy systems should consider open source options over proprietary software or public cloud services, according to a study by prominent British IT academic, Professor Jim Norton.

Norton’s study, released today and commissioned by travel industry processing giant Amadeus, assessed the role of open source software in critical transaction systems.

The study was commissioned, Norton told iTnews upon its release, for the benefit of CIOs in the travel and related industries standing on the precipice of replacing legacy, proprietary systems.

Airlines and railways in particular have sweated outdated mid-range and mainframe systems for several decades. Inevitably, CIOs at these organisations will need to choose between upgrades, outsourcing or adoption of cloud services.

In its first seven years, Aras Corp. grew slowly, with a handful of sales people selling its proprietary software to manufacturing clients.

Frustrated by the slow pace of business, founder Peter Schroer had a realization: “Selling corporate software was not profitable, and the scalability of the business was limited to the number of feet on the street.”

So, in 2007, Schroer took a gamble and embraced the open-source model of software that was sweeping corporate computing. He fired the sales teams and started giving away Aras’s software; the company would make money through services, such as technical support, security updates, training, and related consulting work.

The Hub is riding an unprecedented wave of enterprise software success, with investors and entrepreneurs flocking to startups that provide tech solutions to business clients.

Enterprise technology companies are low profile. They sell to businesses and boast reliable revenues that don’t depend on the whims of consumers. Here are some local enterprise software companies to watch:

• Demandware, which provides e-commerce websites for Adidas, New Balance, Gucci and others around the world, with its customer base growing 35 percent annually. While highly publicized tech IPOs such as Facebook and Zynga fell hard, Demandware stock was trading at $30 Friday after debuting at $23 in March.

• Acquia, founded by open-source software superstar Dries Buytaert, with a content management system used by 2,500 customers including the prime minister of France, the Grammy Awards and every site that ends in .gov.

To thrive in the digital age, marketers at media and entertainment brands are tasked with building profitable relationships directly with their customers, finding new ways to generate revenue from their rich content assets. Every day, they must delight fans by providing free and engaging content, while funneling them to the most valuable properties, personalities or other revenue-generating sections of their site.

It’s a challenge that many marketers face, but in my opinion entertainment companies have the toughest challenge. Each artist, movie, book or other entertainment property is a branded digital experience that must reflect the content and artist, but also must extend beyond a website to multiple interaction points with fans. At the same time, these websites serve as a primary brand hub, generating content and pushing it out across online, mobile and social channels to engage fans where they gather. For these companies, balancing content, community and commerce across web experiences isn’t just challenging – it can be daunting. But having an open source Web Experience Management (WEM) platform can alleviate some of the burden of managing multiple sites, and even contribute to your bottom line by lowering costs and creating efficiencies.

At first, Vancouver-based Appnovation took on a wide range of website development projects for clients, but Mr. Leung realized it needed a focus. So he zeroed in on content management systems that allow users to control a website.

Appnovation started to build applications with Drupal, an open-source content management platform popular among large organizations. It then moved into other service areas, such as mobile apps and back-end office tools, all of which it developed with open-source software.

Those decisions paid off. Today, Appnovation has about 55 employees, and Mr. Leung says 2012 revenue will be about $4.5-million, almost triple last year’s $1.6-million.

The goal of UMass Boston’s Entrepreneurship Center is simple: to get students out and working in the city’s startup community. Since opening four years ago, the Center has grown to offer 99 paid — yes, paid — internships with nearly 45 Massachusetts-based companies, including Buzzient, peerTransfer, Acquia and MassChallenge.

The added bonus? About 70 percent of those students are getting hired full-time when they graduate, according to the Center’s Founder and Director Dan Phillips, the former CEO of SilverBack Technologies and COO of Concord Communications.

Because the Center only opened four years ago, Phillips says it’s “a startup to begin with” and that they’ve “been growing this incrementally.” At the core of the program rests a hands-on approach to learning, which is reflected in both the internship program and the Center’s two cornerstone courses.

It’s a classic quandary — getting people to participate in online communities can be hard, but getting people to participate well in online communities is even harder.

To that end, behavioral management platform Badgeville has announced a new effort to bring its engagement-fostering gamification service to Drupal communities that want to reward their users for quality participation.

There have been lots of efforts through the years to solve the problems of encouraging and rewarding positive participation (and discouraging trolling), from venerable Slashdot’s karma system to StackOverflow’s escalating access mechanism, and now newer gamification schemes aim to incentivize community interaction. Badgeville (which launched at TechCrunch Disrupt back in 2010 and recently locked up an additional $25 million in funding) isn’t exactly the first to run with the concept, but the service’s momentum can’t be denied — Oracle, EMC, Dell, Samsung, and (full disclosure) AOL are just a few of the names on Badgeville’s client roster.

It's Still a Who's Who of WCM
I wish I could show you the magic quadrant diagram to give the picture in a quick snapshot, but I can't. Suffice it say the players are pretty much all the same — this is a who's who of web content management. What does this tell us? I think it tells us that the game is still the same and the established players have all the equipment necessary to play it.

Taking a quick look back at where vendors were on the WCM MQ list last year (in November to be exact), you can see that the leaders are solidified and it will take some bold moves to get into that quadrant. Interestingly, Ektron has been able to do it. Oops. Did I spoil the surprise?

Drupal, get ready for some fun. Badgeville announced the launch of its gamification and behavior management platform for the open-source content, social and commerce management system.

The integration is designed to simplify the ability to apply what Badgeville calls “engagement mechanics” to websites built and managed with Drupal. It will be offered by Drupal-service provider Acquia to its customers.

Menlo Park, Calif. -- Badgeville, the #1 gamification and behavior management platform, today announced the launch of Badgeville for Drupal, the first integration to drive user generated content and other rich user behaviors on top of popular websites and online communities. With this announcement, Badgeville becomes the first gamification platform to offer a pre-packaged integration with Drupal, the leading open-source platform for building rich content, social and commerce experiences.

Badgeville for Drupal makes it easy to apply engagement mechanics on top of Drupal-powered websites. Badgeville for Drupal can drive and reward myriad behaviors, including starting discussion forums, writing and replying to blog posts, and commenting. By creating a more sticky experience on top of Drupal’s rich content tools, companies leveraging Badgeville for Drupal can increase customer loyalty, satisfaction, and retention...

Becoming a hero among Web developers was cool--but it didn't actually pay. So Dries Buytaert, the developer of Drupal, built a company.

Recently I was in Portland, Oregon, and as I was walking to my hotel, some guy comes up to me and says, "Are you Dries?"

It's not like I'm a pop star, but I do get recognized. It happens at the airport, in supermarkets, and even at the beach.

I'm not the kind of person who likes to be in the spotlight. But at the same time, I feel very natural in my role, and so when I get recognized on the street, it's nice to have an opportunity to learn how that person is using Drupal.

There is a lot of passion in the Drupal community. I've seen people shave their heads and leave nothing but a Druplicon, Drupal's logo. At Drupal events, some developers dress up as the Druplicon. Some people have even gotten Drupal tattoos.

Open ... and Shut There once was a time when open source was all about peace, love, and Linux, a bottom-up community of self-selecting hackers that chummed together for the love of good code.

As soon as Linux hit pay dirt, the nature of the open-source community changed forever. Today it is virtually impossible for a successful open-source project to hit critical mass without being consumed by venture capital dollars.

Is this a good thing?

The thought struck me when reading Brian Proffitt's excellent analysis of how "OpenStack is no Linux". Proffitt's point is that "the destiny of OpenStack has been very heavily involved with commercial interests from the very start" - unlike Linux, which only attracted commercial interest later in its development. The implicit accusation feels a bit Lloyd Bentsen-esque: "Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy."

Officials at the National Institute of Standards and Technology could soon be saying goodbye to the agency's proprietary content management system as they consider migrating NIST's external website to an open source solution.

According to a solicitation notice first posted Aug. 3 on the Federal Business Opportunities website, NIST officials have launched a Drupal Web Content Management (WCM) Pilot project to get the necessary expertise and to zero in on requirements needed to move the NIST external website to a cloud-based Drupal web content management system.

Acquia has just announced that it is buying content monitoring vendor Mollom. With Mollom, Acquia says it will be able to build the first social content moderation platform that will ensure the quality of content that appears on client’s websites.

If you have already heard Mollom mentioned in the context of Acquia, it may be because Mollom was co-founded by Benjamin Schrauwen and Dries Buytaert, who is also the co-founder and current CTO of Acquia.

In fact it was because of this link that the two companies were finally merged. In a blog post by Buytaert, he said it made a lot of sense. Both he and Schrauwen were trying to raise capital for Mollom to help fund future product development and expand operations.

Acquia Inc., a venture-backed provider of content management software, has bought content monitoring company Mollom BVBA to boost its ability to manage user-generated content.
Terms of the deal weren't disclosed in a news release....

Today Acquia, the company co-founded by Drupal creator Dries Buytaert to commercialize the open source content management system, acquired Mollom, a spam filtering service also co-founded by Buytaert. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Acquia CEO Tom Erickson tells me the Mollom service will continue to be available for non-Drupal users and pricing will remain unchanged.

Mollom competes with Akismet, the comment spam filtering service provided by WordPress backers Automattic. But Erickson downplays the role that competing with Automattic plays in the acquisition, saying that Drupal generally doesn’t compete head-to-head with WordPress. He says Drupal tends to be used for large sites while WordPress is used for blogs and small sites.

Burlington, MA-based Acquia, a provider of enterprise-level software and services for the open source, social Web publishing system Drupal, is revealing this morning that it has acquired spam-blocking software maker Mollom. Financial details of the transaction were not disclosed, but it appears that the deal is more of a strategic play for both companies than a big startup exit, given that Mollom was co-founded by Acquia CTO and co-founder Dries Buytaert, also Drupal’s original author.

Mollom is a machine-learning play that evaluates user-submitted content—like comments, videos, or software code—on websites and determines the trustworthiness of the source based on parameters a company has set. It requires a CAPTCHA authentication of submissions that look suspicious, and learns from previous instances.